Journey to the Virtual World

VMware App Volumes 2.9 Installation – Part 2

In part 1, we completed the Volumes Manager installation. Let’s complete its configuration in this part 2.

Tristan said in his document to restart the Windows server, so I’m going to do that. Once done, launch the App Volume icon from Windows Server desktop. You get a browser based wizard like the one below:

Click on the Get Started button, and you will see the licensing screenshot below. I will just use the evaluation license for now, as it’s easy to add it later on. Click Next button once you are done.

The next screen is AD integration. App Volume requires AD integration, and this screen is where you specify it. In real Production environment, where best practices must be applied:

specify your LDAP Base. My lab has only a few hundreds objects, so I will leave it blank.

create a service account for App Volume.

The next screen allows you to specify the AD group that can administer App Volumes. Since I already have an EUC Admin in my AD, I’d use that.

The next screen shows the vCenter integration. App Volume works well with Citrix also. There is no screen to integrate with Horizon View, as the integration is done at vCenter level. Specify a service account that will do the integration. In my case, I’ve created an ID called app-volume. This makes tracking easier in vCenter or Log Insight, as I can see the ID.

You can directly connect to ESXi Host, as shown below. I’ve put the text “do not use this” in the ESXi user name as I think you should always interface via vCenter. This makes operations easier.

Click Save button. You get the screenshot like this. You can add multiple vCenter Servers, useful in active/active Horizon View setup.

The next part is Storage. In the case of VSAN, there is only 1 datastore. You can change the folder names and path. I’ve left them as default value so you know what the default values are.

By default, the following templates are created

User Installed Applications (UIA) Only

User Profile Only

UIA and User Profile

These templates can be copied (and resized from their 10 GB default size) as necessary to support individual use-cases or storage scenarios.

Click the Upload button. You get a confirmation like this below. The lab already has some writetable volume as my colleague created 2 writeable volumes a few weeks back.

Click Next. You are essentially done configuring App Volumes Manager.

The next part deals with AppStack. This is what the screenshot looks like.

The next part is logically a separate component, so I will cover them in separate blog to mark the separation. I will cover this in Part 4, as we need to install a few more items first, before we can move to AppStacks. So let’s move to Part 3 to install the Agent and View Broker.